UPDATE (5/18/23): Simon Sebag Montefiore's event at SMU on Tuesday, May 23rd is now free to attend. Books are available for purchase as a ticket add-on, and will be on sale at the event. Tickets ensure one signed copy, reserved seating, and priority book signing.
Presented by Interabang Books as the official bookseller for The World: A Family History
Author Simon Sebag Montefiore will have a lecture at the Meadows Museum at SMU for his new nonfiction book, The World: A Family History, on Tuesday, May 23rd. Tickets to the event will grant audience members entry and a signed book. Additional signed copies of The World will be made available for purchase at the event, courtesy of Interabang Books.
Introduction by Thomas DiPiero, Dean of Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences and professor in the Departments of English and World Languages and Literatures.
Doors Open 5:00
Lecture 5:30
Q&A 6:15
DESCRIPTION OF THE WORLD
Around 950,000 years ago, a family of five walked along the beach and left behind the oldest family footprints ever discovered. For award-winning historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, these poignant, familiar fossils serve as an inspiration for a new kind of world history, one that is genuinely global, spans all eras and all continents, and focuses on the family ties that connect every one of us.
In this epic, ever-surprising book, Montefiore chronicles the world’s great dynasties across human history through palace intrigues, love affairs, and family lives, linking grand themes of war, migration, plague, religion, and technology to the people at the heart of the human drama. It features a cast of extraordinary diversity: in addition to rulers and conquerors, there are priests, charlatans, artists, scientists, tycoons, gangsters, lovers, husbands, wives, and children. There is Hongwu, the beggar who founded the Ming dynasty; Ewuare, the Leopard-King of Benin; Henry Christophe, King of Haiti; Kamehameha, the conqueror of Hawaii; Zenobia, the Arab empress who defied Rome; Lady Murasaki, the first female novelist; Sayyida al-Hurra, the Moroccan pirate-queen. Here too are moderns such as Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, and Volodymyr Zelensky. Here are the Caesars, Medicis and Incas, Ottomans and Mughals, Bonapartes, Habsburgs and Zulus, Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Krupps, Churchills, Kennedys, Castros, Nehrus, Pahlavis and Kenyattas, Saudis, Kims and Assads. These powerful families represent the breadth of human endeavor, with bloody succession battles, treacherous conspiracies, and shocking megalomania alongside flourishing culture, moving romances, and enlightened benevolence. A dazzling achievement as spellbinding as fiction, The World captures the whole human story in a single, masterful narrative.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Simon Sebag Montefiore is a historian whose best-selling books have been published in forty-eight languages and won numerous awards including the Costa Biography Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His books include Catherine the Great and Potemkin; Stalin; Young Stalin; Jerusalem; The Romanovs; and the acclaimed Moscow Trilogy of novels, as well as Written in History and Voices of History. He received his Ph.D. from Cambridge, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in London.
Interabang Books is the official bookseller for The World.